kescusay

@kescusay@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  After working on a team that uses LLMs in agentic mode for almost a year, I’d say this is probably accurate.

  Most of the work at this point for a big chunk of the team is trying to figure out prompts that will make it do what they want, without producing any user-facing results at all. The rest of us will use it to generate small bits of code, such as one-off scripts to accomplish a specific task - the only area where it’s actually useful.

  The shine wears off quickly after the fourth or fifth time it “finishes” a feature by mocking data because so many publicly facing repos it trained on have mock data in them so it thinks that’s useful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In our case, there are enough upper management folks who are opposed to it that I doubt it will last or ever be enforced. For people like me, it really doesn’t make any sense to enforce it in the first place, because all of my teammates are in other states and countries.

  Making me go to the office just means you can’t schedule early meetings with me, because I’ll be commuting during that time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My office just did the same thing. And the backlash is enormous. No one wants it. No one likes it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which stage are you at?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The funny thing is that I’m actually an Arch user. I’m just not a dick about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which stage are you at?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, this sucks. Use the distro you like, people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'3d-printing a screw' is a way to describe how AI integration is stupid most of the time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right, unit tests are another area where they can be helpful, as long as you’re very careful to check them over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'3d-printing a screw' is a way to describe how AI integration is stupid most of the time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually, there’s growing evidence that beyond a certain point, more context drastically reduces their performance and accuracy.

  I’m of the opinion that LLMs will need a drastic rethink before they can reach the point you describe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'3d-printing a screw' is a way to describe how AI integration is stupid most of the time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So there are a few very specific tasks that LLMs are good at from the perspective of a software developer:

  1. Certain kinds of analysis tasks can be done very quickly and efficiently with Copilot in agent mode. For instance, having it assess your existing code for adherence to stylistic standards where a violation isn’t going to trigger a linting error.
  2. Quick script writing is something it excels at. There are all kinds of circumstances where you might need an independent script, such as a database seed file. It’s not part of the application itself, but it’s a useful utility to have, and Copilot is good at writing them.
  3. Scaffolding a new application. If you’re creating something brand new and know which tools you want to use for it, but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting everything up yourself, having Copilot do it can be a real time saver.

  And that’s… pretty much it. I’ve experimented with building applications with “prompt engineering,” and to be blunt, I think the concept is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that once the application exceeds the LLM’s context window size, which is necessarily small, you’re going to see it make a lot more mistakes than it already does, because - just as an example - by the time you’re having it write the frontend for a new API endpoint, it’s already forgotten how that endpoint works.

  As the application approaches production size in features and functions, the number of lines of code becomes an insurmountable bottleneck for Copilot. It simply can’t maintain a comprehensive understanding of what’s already there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'3d-printing a screw' is a way to describe how AI integration is stupid most of the time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. It’s not true. Any company that fires all of its developers and sets up some poor intern to prompt-engineer updates to their codebase is going to fail spectacularly.

  Source: I’m a software developer and use LLMs regularly. There are certain tasks they are very good at, but anyone who commits unexamined code generated by an LLM gets exactly what they deserve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How’s your badly-generated AI meme game? Dictators don’t get very far around these parts unless they or their sycophants can shit out dozens of horrifyingly plastic-looking, improbably-muscular pictures of themselves riding giant bald eagles while American flags explode in the background.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How To Argue With An AI Booster⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also the fact that what we are currently calling AI isn’t, that there are better options that aren’t environmental catastrophes (I’m hopeful about small language models), and that no one seems to want all the “AI” being jammed into every goddamn thing.

  No, I don’t want Gemini in my email or messaging, I want to read messages from people myself. No, I don’t want Copilot summaries of my meetings in Teams, half the folks I work with have accents it can’t parse. Get the hell out of my way when I’m trying to interact with actual human beings.

  And I say that as someone whose job literally involves working with LLMs every day. Ugh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study links TikTok scrolling to poor study focus: Just five minutes of scrolling the social app made college students less focused⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is why I have never and will never download the app, go to the website, or otherwise watch any TikTok content.

  I still have enough of an attention span to read actual books and watch full-length movies, and I want to keep it that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I set up a WAF for my company’s publicly facing developer portal to block out bot traffic from assholes like these guys. It reduced bot traffic to the site by something like - I kid you not - 99.999%.

  Fucking data vultures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Coordinated SLM governors that can redirect queries to the appropriate SLM seems like a good solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How the hell are they going to sustain the expense to power that? Setting aside the environmental catastrophe that this kind of “AI” entails, they’re just not very profitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, that’s also pretty safe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you using Copilot in agent mode? That’s where it breaks shit. If you’re using it in ask mode with the file you want to edit added to the chat context, then you’re probably going to be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve tried threats in prompt files, with results that are… OK. Honestly, I can’t tell if they made a difference or not.

  The only thing I’ve found that consistently works is writing good old fashioned scripts to look for common errors by LLMs and then have them run those scripts after every action so they can somewhat clean up after themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have to test it with Copilot for work. So far, in my experience its “enhanced capabilities” mostly involve doing things I didn’t ask it to do extremely quickly. For example, it massively fucked up the CSS in an experimental project when I instructed it to extract a React element into its own file.

  That’s literally all I wanted it to do, yet it took it upon itself to make all sorts of changes to styling for the entire application. I ended up reverting all of its changes and extracting the element myself.

  Suffice to say, I will not be recommending GPT 5 going forward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This website is for humans⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At my company, we had to implement all sorts of WAF rules precisely for that reason. Those things are fucking aggressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More and more, for tasks like that I simply will not use an LLM at all. I’ll use a nice, predictable, deterministic script. Weirdly, LLMs are pretty decent at writing those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not yet. I’ll give them a shot if they promise never to say “you’re absolutely correct” or give me un-requested summaries about how awesome they are in the middle of an unfinished task.

  Actually, I have to give GPT 5 credit on one thing: It’s actually sort of paying attention to the copilot-instructions.md file, because I put this snippet in it: “You don’t celebrate half-finished features, and your summaries of what you’ve accomplished are not only rare, they’re never more than five sentences long. You just get straight to the point.” And - surprise, surprise - it has strictly followed that instruction.

  Fucks up everything else, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Software developer, here. (No, not a “vibe coder.” I actually know how to read and write my own code and what it does.)

  Just had the opportunity to test GPT 5 as a coding assistant in Copilot for VS Code, which in my opinion is the only legitimately useful purpose for LLMs. (No, not to write everything for me, just to do some of the more tedious tasks faster.) The IDE itself can help keep them in line, because it detects when they screw up. Which is all the time, due to their nature. Even recent and relatively “good” models like Sonnet need constant babysitting.

  GPT 5 failed spectacularly. So badly, in fact, that I’m glad I only set it to analysis tasks and not to any write tasks. I will not be using it for anything else any time soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uber Eats is adding AI to menus, food photos, and reviews⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As a software developer who is currently working on a “prompt engineering” task, the words “you are absolutely correct” are like knives to my soul now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Banning open source would basically destroy the entire Internet in the United States. No tech bro is going to want that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair. I guess what I hate is what the term represents, rather than the term itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I actively hate the term “vibe coding.” The fact is, while using an LLM for certain tasks is helpful, trying to build out an entire, production-ready application just by prompts is a huge waste of time and is guaranteed to produce garbage code.

  At some point, people like your coworker are going to have to look at the code and work on it, and if they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ll fail.

  I commend them for giving it a shot, but I also commend them for recognizing it wasn’t working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you using agent mode?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s still not actually knowing anything. It’s just temporarily adding more context to its model.

  And it’s always very temporary. I have a yarn project I’m working on right now, and I used Copilot in VS Code in agent mode to scaffold it as an experiment. One of the refinements I included in the prompt file to build it is reminders throughout for things it wouldn’t need reminding of if it actually “knew” the repo.

  • I had to constantly remind it that it’s a yarn project, otherwise it would inevitably start trying to use NPM as it progressed through the prompt.
  • For some reason, when it’s in agent mode and it makes a mistake, it wants to delete files it has fucked up, which always requires human intervention, so I peppered the prompt with reminders not to do that, but to blank the file out and start over in it.
  • The frontend of the project uses TailwindCSS. It could not remember not to keep trying to downgrade its configuration to an earlier version instead of using the current one, so I wrote the entire configuration for it by hand and inserted it into the prompt file. If I let it try to build the configuration itself, it would inevitably fuck it up and then say something completely false, like, “The version of TailwindCSS were using is still in beta, let me try downgrading to the previous version.”

  I’m not saying it wasn’t helpful. It probably cut 20% off the time it would have taken me to scaffold out the app myself, which is significant. But it certainly couldn’t keep track of the context provided by the repo, even though it was creating that context itself.

  Working with Copilot is like working with a very talented and fast junior developer whose methamphetamine addiction has been getting the better of it lately, and who has early onset dementia or a brain injury that destroyed their short-term memory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn’t it replace coders, it fundamentally can’t. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.

  The reason it goes down a “really bad path” is that it’s basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn’t know anything.

  On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there’s no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.

  Take the phrase “fruit flies like a banana.” Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?

  It’s a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we’ve got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don’t.